The Birthplace Of Our Morning Meal Wants No One To Forget

BATTLE CREEK, MICH. — Listen closely as the milk splashes into a bowl of cereal, for in the snap, crackle and pop, faint echoes of the old-time American medicine show can still be heard.

``It all began when Dr. Kellogg had a patient who broke her false teeth on a piece of brick-hard toast,`` says 64-year-old Frances Thornton, who, with a few like-minded souls, has been struggling to preserve the memory of her hometown`s role as the one-time health food and spa capital of America.

In other places, historical preservationists band together to save grand old Gothic mansions or Greek-revival public buildings from the wrecker`s ball. But Thornton and a dozen allies have been trying to rescue a run-down, nondescript factory building.

A century ago in that humble structure, John Harvey Kellogg transformed the nation`s breakfast habits. He made himself a millionaire in the process, but he also sparked a get-rich fever that gave turn-of-the century Battle Creek the look of a gold-rush town in the Wild West.

Locally the building is still called the San, short for ``sanitarium,`` a word coined by Kellogg, who was a non-stop inventor as well as a medical man. Before his time, the dictionary entry was ``sanatarium,`` meaning a place for people with chronic diseases like tuberculosis. When he started spelling the word with an ``i,`` correspondents wrote that the word wasn`t in the dictionary. ``It will be someday,`` he said.

The Battle Creek Sanitarium, over which Kellogg presided for 62 years, was devoted not simply to curing illness but to enhancing health.

Such was his reputation for being able to do so that Kellogg`s guest list was a veritable social register, as the nation`s rich and famous regularly checked in for a physical and mental tuneup. So when an elderly guest lost her false teeth to the hardtack that was the San`s morning staple, as it was in many American homes, it set the doctor to thinking about the problem of breakfast.

Afterward, Kellogg said the solution came to him in a dream and that, trusting the vision, he instructed his wife, Ella, to boil some wheat. When he fed those softened grains through a set of rollers, they broke off into individual flakes, which, when baked, produced a new, light and chewy dish to set before the San`s guests in a bowl with milk.

Thus did Kellogg start a revolution in American eating habits whose effects, for better or worse, are to be seen in every supermarket in the land. The myriad breakfast foods that line the shelves-each claiming to build stronger bones and healthier bodies than the next brand and all with offers of ``free`` premiums cleverly designed to turn children into screaming monsters if their mothers don`t buy a box-all descend from Kellogg`s pioneering batch of precooked cereal.

Of course, the supermarket phase of Kellogg`s fledgling breakfast-food industry came much later; mass merchandising hardly existed when he made his stove-top breakthrough of 1894. But he quickly made it possible for guests to buy boxes of his Toasted Corn Flakes (as he named his most popular concoction) to take home, so they could continue to practice lessons in proper diet taught in his sanitarium. With the help of his younger brother, William Keith Kellogg, Dr. Kellogg also established a mail-order office. Indeed, the doctor was something of a marketing genius whose kit of sales techniques began with his own public persona.

``Dr. Kellogg always dressed in white, head to toe, and kept a white pet cockatoo perched on his shoulder,`` recalls Thornton, who as a child lived near the Kellogg mansion. ``Exercise was a big part of his teaching and he rode a bicycle to the San. Mornings, he`d go pedaling off while his chauffeur ran alongside, carrying an umbrella in case it should rain.``

When Kellogg took over the San, at age 24 and fresh out of medical school, it was a rapidly failing health spa (then called the Western Health Reform Institute) established by Ellen G. White, the founder of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. During the middle years of the 19th Century, Sister White, as she was called, had had a series of visions, leading her to predict that the end of the world was at hand. Then she revised her timetable, preaching that clean living was the surest way of getting to heaven and enjoining followers to abstain from drinking alcohol, coffee and tea and from eating meat.

Sister White was also suspicious of drugs and doctors, a not unreasonable position in that the age of scientific medicine had barely begun. At her spa, one remedy was prescribed for all of mankind`s ills: hydrotherapy. Believers were given therapeutic baths and encouraged to down water by the glassful. Evidently the results weren`t impressive, because when the first blush of Sister White`s prophecies began to fade, it became harder to attract guests to her spa.